Desert of Divine Despair

Many aeons ago, when the Gods were young and the world was new, the Storm Queen and the Mad Lord of Avarice met in battle in the heavens. The battle between the two raged not for hours, but for decades, with no quarter asked, and none recieved in their madness. Beneath them, the lands were shredded by mighty winds and shattered with the force of the Mad Lord's blade, while the soil was soaked and charged by the very blood of the gods. In the end, both of the gods had been weakened enough in their battle that for precious moments, each was no longer immortal. In the beginning of their moment, the golden steel sword of the Lord of Greed crashed into the crackling blade of wind and thunder the Storm Queen called her own, and in one shimmering moment, each shattered as if they were made of fine glass. Reduced at last to biting and clawing, the Gods withdrew from their battle, concerned far more with survival than with vanquishing their foe, each drained of their fury, and indeed, much of their divine power.

Now, hundreds of millenia after the battle here, the lands have changed in response to the divine blood that soaks them.

Though often dead and empty of life, this shattered land does not lack the rain and moisture that marks a typical desert. In fact, it has them in overabundance. On a nearly daily basis, wicked windstorms, titanic typhoons, and horrible hurricanes scour the land, battering and lashing at everything they find. At night, hail and slashing drops of frozen rain rail down upon the ground, scouring it free of soil and life, and even the rocks beneath shatter at night.

Beneath the shattering force of the weather, the land is broken and rough, a maze of shifting caves and ravines, created and shattered by constant, eternal earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions are frequent here, showering the land with ash and rock, which is almost immediately beaten and frozen back into the ground by the fierce weather.

Where rivers run through the gutted land, they run deep and fast and red, and taste of blood. Those that drink of them are suffused with the divinity that soaks the land, their lives becoming longer and healthier, though it tinges their minds with chaos.

Furthermore, a spirit of madness inhabits this place, and it settles into any creature brave or stupid enough to attepmt to cross the lands. Their thoughts are scattered and they find it increasingly difficult to concentrate on a single thing. They lose the restraints that keep them behaving in a civilized, or even a pack or herd manner, acting upon any little thought that may cross their mind, guilt and selflessness slowly leeching away from their mind. In the madness, they are greedy and destructive, and will go to any lengths to take any little thing they might want, as long as they can remember what it is. In any case, whatever they attain is not enough, and they will want more.

Why bother to come here? The treasure of those who have died crossing it, and the Shards of the Storm...

An exceptionally dangerous badlands, the Desert of Divine Despair is really quite indifferent to things like Character Level, the basics needed to survive it will be the same no matter who you are. Daring men and women may skirt its edges to evade persuit or gain an advantage on a foe, or they may penetrate deeper in in order to seek the lost treasures of the madlands. So too, do the gods hold council here from time to time, knowing that they cannot be harmed by the effects of the land, and an eye of the storm seems to follow them when they are here, the land bright and clear near them. Here there are so very few mortals who can reach them. Still, here is one of the few places where a mortal may have the chance to gaze upon much of the pantheon, and even gain their attention for a short time, for they are well aware of the area's hazards.